MIT Club of Northern California
Growing Companies Lecture Series:
Re-defining product development to support rapid growth

Featuring Ian Eslick, Founder, Silicon Spice, Director of Software Engineering, Broadcom

TUESDAY, June 26, 2001
Agilent Laboratories Palo Alto
6pm food and registration, 7pm lecture and Q&A
$15 for MIT club members in advance, $20 for others, at the door
please RSVP to Anne-Can
mitbizevents@aol.com, 408.323.2255

Ian Eslick founded Silicon Spice in 1996 with fellow MIT alumni, Robert French and Ethan Mirsky. They planned to build an enduring company through great ideas and raw technical talent. While Silicon Spice grew into a 120 person, $1.2 billion corporation in just four years (acquired by Broadcom in 2000), Ian learned that how he ran his product development organization was as critical to success as being able to generate great product ideas.

Early-on a few super-star engineers were sufficient to push Silicon Spice products forward. As the company grew past 60 people and product complexity increased, professional management and product development processes were needed. At each stage of further growth, a different matrix of communication methods, organizational structure, and technology choices were required. Ian will speak about the stages of transformation he experienced at Silicon Spice, how his company knew it was time to change, and how the company changed to support growth.

Ian is currently Director of software engineering at Broadcom Corporation responsible for product-line software development in the Carrier Access Business Unit. Ian joined Broadcom via the acquisition of Silicon Spice, where he drove the execution of the first commercial product. Prior to Silicon Spice, Ian was a student at MIT, involved in the Transit Project and Reinventing Computing in the Artificial Intelligence laboratory. He worked on the implementation of large-scale parallel machines, design of chip-scale reconfigurable computing engines and the architecture of adaptive software systems. Ian graduated from MIT in 1996 with a B.S. and M.Eng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The MIT Club Growing Companies Lecture Series is a forum for entrepreneurs to learn and exchange ideas about how to turn the hot start-ups of today into the enduring corporations of tomorrow.